How I Work

What makes therapy work?

My whole life I’ve been a seeker and what some describe by the phrase “workshop junkie.” As well as professional trainings I’ve done many workshops and similar things for my own exploration. A small number were unhelpful, though happily the great majority lay  somewhere between beneficial and  at times transformative. This page contains some musings about what it is that makes therapies safe, helpful, healing and hopefully transformative.

These principles are what go through my mind all the time in working with clients and if I live up to them even a good part of that time, then as a practitioner I am happy. It would be an utter failure of humility to claim that I work like this always.

Please see here for some detailed discussions of particular therapies.

Safety (1) Metta: freedom from judgements

The first therapist to realise the importance of the positive atmosphere the therapist creates was Carl Rogers, the creator of person-centred therapy. We fear ourselves to be shameful, inadequate, and not enough and we hide behind masks, games and avoidances. So it’s a given that as we cautiously open these hidden raw places to the possibility of healing, we need to be very sure they will be met with what Buddha called loving-kindness (metta) and what Rogers called unconditional positive regard. So freedom from judgement is foundational.

Safety (2) Empathy and intuition

But there’s a deeper safety than acceptance, and that is  empathic and intuition. It’s the feeling that as we slowly open wounds we are not just safe from negative criticisms, we are in a positive way deeply understood.

Empathy is when a we explain something and the other person can show they understand us, they get where we are coming from, they somehow accompany our inner experience. It creates a bridge of humanity between us and the other. This is nourishing to us even when they  don’t share our situation or can’t help us.

Intuition is when the other person shows they understand things we have not explained. Deeper still is the intuition that can understand and reflect back to us something that even we ourselves are unaware of.

We have a profound need to be understood, to know that the world around somehow fits with us and we fit in the world. Empathy and intuition can give that deep safety.

It’s been my happy fortune to meet many healers with this gift of intuition to a high degree. When someone can see me this deeply it feels magical – I ask myself how could anyone know something so deep about me?  Perhaps, it simply is magic.

Carl Rogers developed a whole therapy based only on expressing empathy and this article explain s a little about his work.

Safety (3) The therapist feels safe when we feel our emotions

There’s a third aspect of safety, and it’s one you’ve probably never thought about: we have a need to know that the therapist can cope with whatever emotions we bring.

Our emotions are powerful and they are layered. Behind stubbornness perhaps shame, behind the shame, deep pain; behind anger, hurt or fear. Behind trauma,  terror, powerlessness, loss of self, dividedness, and hatred. Although I’ve never practiced it, I’ve trained in a bodywork emotional release therapy called Neo-Reichian bodywork, which works hands-on with the muscular tensions in the body that hold emotions in place and had extensive experience with core emotions.

The journey of transformation is to learn that these are not realities of our being, but fundamentally most often bad dreams. But to start off, we feel that we are shameful, we are powerless and that is terrifying. We know we can’t face the feelings and we fear if we share them with other people, they will be overwhelmed too. So  if at times in therapy emerging emotions carry us into the frightening unknown, it good to know that even if we ourselves don’t understand what’s going on, at least someone does. And if we ourselves feel overwhelmed, the therapist remains solid and safe.

We deeply need someone to see the best in us

Stop reading for a minute and picture in your mind that right this moment someone is seeing all that is good in you. Further, they are  seeing only those things that are good, nothing bad. Take a couple of minutes. Close your eyes, have a couple of relaxing breaths. And enter the sense of being with someone who is seeing only the good in you.

What is that like? Perhaps there’s memory of a tender or a proud moment with a parent or teacher or a grandparent. Or maybe there’s a longing that if only there had been someone see the good in you; or grief that you lost such a person.  And sadly so many of us feel that there just is nothing good inside us, and so maybe there is a despair around that.

So a crucial, vital need is this: that the therapist actively seeks what is the best in each person and keeps on even when the person themselves is sure it is not there. You need to know that the therapist is in a therapeutic sense on your side. The therapist is not just helping you to feel and think differently, but actively trusting that your inner treasures are not lost, only mislaid.

This is the reason that  I value Solution Oriented Therapy so much. Many therapies have a profound trust that people are good, but only solution-oriented therapy has as it basic method the assumption that people are good and capable. That’s unique.

Some therapeutic tasks

Healing past hurt and trauma (1) One foot in the past, one foot in the present.

There are a few ways to talk about the past.

• We recount past events over and over in our minds and to others. In a way the goal of therapy is to stop doing this, so there’s no point in doing this over and over in therapy too.
• A second way, of course always needed, is to inform the therapist of events.
• Then there is recounting the past as an honouring of all a person has been through. This happens spontaneously and  when it does so it is profound
• Then there is a special way of talking, which therapists call “one foot in the past, one foot in the future. What that means is this:

The basic key for healing past trauma and past hurt is that the past is over. Painful, sometimes crippling, imprints are left in the mind. But these are imprints; the harmful events are over and finished. Cognitively, we know this. But emotionally we don’t. The problem is that painful and traumatic events get stored in the unconscious mind, and the unconscious has little or no feeling of time – think transcendental experiences with a timeless quality.  When shocking or overwhelming events get stored here, it feels like they are always continuing. That is, we feel the imprint – the feeling of being afraid – and assume the cause is still with us, ie that there is still danger. The therapeutic job is to somehow communicate with the traumatised part that the past is the past and the present moment is safe.

To do this, you  need to feel two things at once. One is a clear here and now feeling that the present is safe. Simultaneously  you need to remember the shocking or overwhelming event – NOT all at once, but VERY gently and incrementally.  And slowly the hut part emerges from shock and overwhelm.

Safety comes from many sources, including when we feel ourselves in our body; eye contact with a compassionate person; knowing you will be understood when you explain things; stretching; deep relaxation; massage therapies; dance, running, movement; very many others. Once you have this safety, only then can you connect with past painful events or climates and begin to relax that: that was then … this is now.  To repeat, we know this cognitively. The point is to feel it in our bones as an existential fact.

This “one foot in the past, one foot in the present” process is well known throughout the whole world of healing, and I first learned of it doing the peer-counselling process called Re-evaluation Co-Counselling when I was a student.

There’s a widespread belief that this can’t apply to pre-verbal trauma, but that isn’t true at all. Such hurts are deeper and things go slower, but trance methods using imagery or music can communicate deep into the unconscious, as can methods based on movement and the physical body. In any case although the trauma happened pre-verbally and we can’t narrate the events, the trauma shapes and colours our use of language at every level.

Healing past hurt and trauma (2) Traumatised parts need gentle contact

I’ve explained a lot about parts and splitting in other posts, so I won’t repeat that. Human children need humanity in every day of our young lives. We need to be safe and protected. We need both mum and dad to be a refuge of safety. We need love that meets our needs on that day: some days love means to be held tight until our sobbing stops, on other days love means to be left alone to fall over and learn a lesson the hard way. But love, every day. Tragically, it’s common that we have events and climates that are destructive and vile. This creates when some call the hurt inner child, and some call developmental trauma. xxx

THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION AND THIS, DEAR READER, IS WHERE I’M STOPPING FOR THE EVENING! SUN FEB 22

Honouring life’s journey

Sometimes a therapist’s job is to do little, but rather to be an empathetic and honouring witness.

There are times when what a person needs is to tell all that’s happened to them aloud to a  empathetic witness an honouring of their journey. Perhaps they  need to say things out loud to organise events in their mind and make sense of them. Or they may need to tell the whole story start to finish to to get hold of the enormity of that they’ve lived through. Such accounts are always a privilege to hear.

Although it’s not normally thought of in this way, Family Constallation  is the therapy that works with life as a journey: men and women on their individual journeys that intersect and intertwine through families and shared fates.